Last week I attended a blogger event, pulled together under the auspices of Boots I believe. It was aimed at beauty bloggers, so not 100% sure why I was on the list, but it was a very good event, looking at 2 different devices that use light to help you in the quest for looking and feeling good. First of these was the more straightforward. It’s Sensationail, a system that provides you with the ability to use gel nail varnish at home. The key component is a light nail dryer. Powered by LED lights, (so it stays reasonably cool), the…
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Last week I went to a preview screening for Red Dawn (the 2012 version, not the one that was released in 1984). It was a blogger screening (or at least a blog readers screening) that I had won from Mel at Miss Geeky. I’ve been lucky this year with Mel – I’d previously won a great Les Miserables prize pack. So how was the film? In generally, pretty enjoyable! I have fond recollections of the first one (I wonder how many people watching remembered that) and was interested to see how they would update it. First of all, it’s North…
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Duncan Chapple’s post brought to my attention that the LinkedIn guide that I contributed to last year (in fact, last May) is now online. The B2B Marketing Linked In Best Practice Guide is available for purchase now. I’ve started looking through the rest of the book (I contributed the section on Brand Building) and so far loving the contribution of the others. As well as Duncan, there are sections from Andy Bargery, Mark Fones and Maya Grinberg
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Social media and word of mouth is the new advertising and nothing else is needed – well, according to some social media’gurus’. As Ramon De Leon said at Le Web, advertising (the old version) is the tax on being boring. He may be right to an extent, but there’s no doubt that his Domino’s franchises will still benefit from the the national advertising spend that the parent company provide. I wouldn’t call Ramon a social media guru, given I reserve that term for those who talk more than they act and the key thing that he does is act –…
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I woke up today to find that Twitter has decided to break itself and started to censor what it shows me. Before today, when I decided to follow someone, I saw all of their public tweets, all of their replies, no matter to whom they were replying. This was a setting in the system, allowing me to see everything. However, by default, it was turned off. Given that few people never change the default, most people did not use this setting, which could be part of the reason why they never quite get it, why there is such a drop…
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Update: this becomes even more confusing. First of all, Amazon’s response was that it was policy Then they blamed a ‘glitch’. Then a troll came out of the woodwork and announced to the world that he had done it, through clickjacking and other means Now an ex-employee Amazon blames the French, or at least a French employee, who conflated the scope of the word ‘adult’ to include the erotic Now Amazon call it “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” affecting over 57000 books A cataloguing error, a lack of response from Amazon followed by confusing messages and a lot of…
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Last night, the Guardian Word of Mouth blog ran a chocolate tasting and they really did deliver. There was a room full of pieces of chocolate Easter Eggs for us to enjoy, ranging from supermarket basic types all the way up to gourmet organic chocolate. As well as bowls and bowls of choc, there was the opportunity to try some port or Courvoisier. or some Gonzalez Byass exclusive sherry or even to get a demonstration of chocolate making. It was a brilliant evening, ably organised by Suse and everyone looked liked they were enjoying themselves as they ate their way…
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On the one hand, the Olympics are the most wonderful celebration of humanity, of striving to be the best, faster, higher, stronger as the motto says. On the other hand, I find them – the organisation behind the games – to be one of the most cynical and grasping of organisations, historically prone to corruption, pushing their weight around to control the image, the trademarks, the media rights, anything that generates money. This evening, I went along to the IET for a Pinkerton Lecture, on using social media to inspire change. Delivered by Alex Balfour, who is the Head of…
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It’s the Great British Beer Festival this week at Earl’s Court, a huge cavern of a place that is full of beer and beer drinkers. As part of their ongoing campaign to widen the appeal of beer CAMRA are running some free tours, a Girl’s Guide to the Great British Beer Festival. They’re curated by Melissa Cole, who’s an independent beer journalist and member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. Tonight was their first run of the tour, a group of about 12 of us were the guinea pigs for this attempt to spread the word about beer to…
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Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, David Parmet  DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together – he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing? What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media? DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers. Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they…
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Last year I really enjoyed Futures of Entertainment, a 2 day conference up at MIT, all about transmedia entertainment. they are runningit again this year and details can be found on their site. I’ve gone and booked a ticket (assuming i can sort out the logistics). Last year I live blogged it, which considering each session was about 3 hours, took some concentration!. I’ve listed the posts below. Sam Ford has some links as well. Well worth the time I think, so go and book now over here. Virtual Worlds: They are becoming platforms for thought experiments — some of…
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Interested in going to Blogher07. Scrapblog have joined forces with the conference to offer an all-expenses paid trip to the conference for two. But only in North America – I wish these competitions for web based companies which are global in their vary nature would make these restrictions clear on the main page and not buried in terms and conditions. Entry is simple – create a scrapblog, tag it and get people to visit it. This is a traffic and member generation strategy, as the more people you get to see your scrapblog, the more entries you get. Go ahead-…
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Tonight at the Problogger meetup, I met up with Keith, from vibrator.com (do you need a warning that that link is NSFW?) As an e-commerce site, it is very web2.0; there’s a pretty good blog, all the right prompts to delicious, digg, technorati etc and the UGC competition – submit your own erotic story. Furthermore Keith is quite happy for bloggers to get samples to test and blog about – and I’m pretty sure he won’t need them back 😉 Considering the other blog is called Behind the Buzz, that could be something to think about!
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Walmart launch a new video download service today. Apparently their development team is browser challenged as they only appear to have IE available to them. Under that app, their site looks, well, not beautiful but at least OK. However, on Firefox it looks like this: I know that sites sometimes launch without full testing…and that Walmart Video is probably targeted fully at those who have never heard of anyother browser but a token effort to fail gracefully would have been nice. (Tip: Valleywag)
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This is now back…some changes but nothing substantial. One of the projects I’ve been working on, at least from a metrics and tracking perspective, is a US campaign for Domino’s Pizza: Anything Goes, any large pizza, any topping any crust for $9.99. Supported by a heavy TV promotion, in-store, email, SMS, online advertising, all the usual stuff, it also had an unusual contest and teaser video component. The concept behind the online promotion is that anything goes for $9.99. So for 5 weeks, starting 1 Jan, Dominos have been auctioning items on eBay for $9.99. From ipods to video cameras…
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Flash is commonly used with websites to bring life and movement, to bring entertainment and improve the experience. When used well, it really helps with telling the story and getting a message across. When used badly, it sucks. Kellogg’s Special K use of flash definitely falls into the latter category. It uses heavy flash to display product information (killing the browser at the same time). Whilst product info is in the flash object, a badly formatted image pops up to display nutritional info which looks like it was scanned in from the packets. Flash is not the best software to…
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Hugh is offering to help solve the conundrum of meshing big, corporate business advertising as performed by the big corporate advertising agencies with the world that is Web2.0. He has a solution he’s willing to offer you for $100k. And if I had the cash, I might have taken him up on the offer, given the success he’s having with Stormhoek, English Cut and others. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging away here, hopefully breaking down a few barriers and making small steps into moving the big clients closer to a different way of using the web. I mentioned fear in my…
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Dave Taylor has a good take on the Vista laptop promotion being run by Microsoft and Edelman. In his opinion they’re sending out laptops instead of the OS DVD as the upgrade process, combined with the machine specs would mean that many of the target bloggers would not have a good time installing this. There are copies of Vista around (I’ve got one somewhere) so that tactic is being tried, but getting a DVD through the post is not as near as much fun as unwrapping a laptop. The PR team are trying to leverage that thrill factor and would…
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Eric, over at CommonSense PR, has listed 5 key points about choosing a blogging consultant. Some excellent points there, especially about checking the blogging history of the consultant and ther references. I would add a further one, in that also check the variety and breadth of previous work. One thing I have found with digital teams for marketing websites is that sometimes the company can have a very long track record of completed projects but every single one is the ‘same’, they just changed the colours and the words with little or no creative thought.  SO, when choosing a consultant…
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Starbucks’ itsredagain is their Holiday website. It’s definitely multilingual, having you pass through 2 pages to choose your language and even gives a subtitle choice for those lacking speakers ;-).  There’s nothing groundbreaking here, with a choice of send your own greeting card or submit your Christmas tradition to be added to the interactive map. But what is there is done well, very well. Good creative, flowing usability, it;s about knowing what you want to do and executing superbly.  The page also links out to cheerpass.com, a blog for people to submit stories of random acts of kindness, creating a…